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Latest Stories

Dumb and Dumber

Even more proof that truth is stranger than fiction.

How stupid can some people
be? Read about the exploits of some not-so-bright crooks,
following in the spirit of a May 2003 JofA article, “
The World’s Dumbest Fraudsters. ”

id you hear the one about the bank robber who wrote a
holdup note on the back of his own utility bill? We’ve come to expect
that the garden-variety crook may not be the sharpest knife in the
drawer, but fraudsters are supposed to be smarter, aren’t they? Sit
back, have a laugh and decide for yourself.

DOCTORING CREDIT CARDS Wanda
H., who had a trusted position at the Stanford Medical Center near San
Francisco, needed to decorate her new home. So she accessed financial
data belonging to some of the more prominent doctors at the facility
and used their credit card information to pay for the furnishings. She
was home free, so to speak, until she invited the same doctors to a
housewarming party. They quickly figured out what was going on and
reported her to the police.

ATTENTION, WAL-MART SHOPPERS!
Alice P. went on a shopping spree at a
Georgia Wal-Mart, filling several carts to the brim. When the cashier
totaled up $1,672 in merchandise, Alice handed the worker a $1 million
bill and asked for the remaining change in cash. Knowing the largest
U.S. bill in circulation was $100, Wal-Mart called the police. “This
is the first time in my law enforcement career that I’ve seen someone
try to use a $1 million bill,” said local police chief Almond Turner,
who promptly arrested Alice.

EXTENDED STUPIDITY No one had seen Joseph G. of Philadelphia steal the credit card.
And as he had carefully disguised himself, it was impossible for the
clerk at the stereo store to identify the person who actually charged
$2,700 for a premium sound system. How then were the police able to
arrest him so quickly? It seems the hapless fraudster also had
purchased extended warranties on the new gear—using his real name and
address.

A TICKET TO JAIL
Looking for a bit of extra cash to pay for a
computer and printer, Anthony G. of Madison, Wisconsin,
hatched a plan: He’d print fake parking tickets and mail them
to local citizens. Anthony even rented an extra-large post
office box for the money that no doubt would be pouring in.
But the only thing that poured in was the cops. How did they
find him? Although the tickets looked real enough, all of them
had the same identification number—which just happened to
match the one on his own recent parking ticket.

PARDON ME? Albert D. was serving a long sentence in a federal penitentiary
near Tampa, Florida, when he came up with a plan to build a nest egg
to use when he was released. He told fellow inmates that, for a fee,
he could get anyone a pardon directly from the president of the United
States. Albert managed to collect $90,000 before anyone had the sense
to ask, “If you can get anyone a pardon, why are you still
behind bars?”

THE DISAPPEARING ACT Jeffrey P. of West Lafayette, Indiana, thought he had devised
the perfect crime: He’d write checks using disappearing ink. By the
time they were processed for collection, he reasoned, the ink would be
gone and his account wouldn’t be charged. But enough traces of the ink
remained so the police were able to easily figure out the scam. It
also was simple for them to track Jeffrey down; his name and address
were preprinted on the checks—in regular ink.

HACKING INTO JAIL
Lars H. of Copenhagen, Denmark, had a highly
illegal hobby: hacking into computers to obtain bank account
and credit card information. But Lars’s pastime came to a
sudden halt when he tapped into the data of one
individual—Arne Lindstrom, head of the Copenhagen police
department’s computer crime unit.

THE DIGITLESS DENTIST John R., a Jacksonville, Florida, dentist, had grown tired of
his profession and he wanted out. So he hatched a plan with his two
brothers to cut off one of his pinky fingers and claim it was a
wood-chopping accident. That way, John would be disabled and could
claim a large insurance settlement. The day of the crime, though, he
got cold hands—so to speak—but his brothers didn’t; they forcibly held
him down and hacked off his finger.

Sure enough, John collected a $1.3 million check from his insurance
company. Part of the proceeds went to buy the digitless dentist a
yacht he named Minus One. And he paid his brothers a total of $45,000
for their assistance. That’s when the real problem began: They wanted
a half-million bucks. Rather than pay up, John contacted the FBI and
reported that the two were attempting to extort money from him. After
hearing the whole story, the authorities charged the three brothers
with insurance fraud. They all went to prison.

A MOUSE STORY
Carla P. and her son Ricky were enjoying a meal
in a chain restaurant in Newport News, Virginia, when Carla
discovered a dead mouse in her bowl of vegetable soup. The
quick-thinking Ricky took pictures of it with his cell-phone
camera. Not wanting to expose the popular restaurant to the
negative publicity a lawsuit would bring, the pair
magnanimously proposed turning over the photos to the chain in
exchange for a one-time payment of a half-million dollars.

But when the restaurant owners met with them to hand over
a check, Carla and Ricky were arrested for attempted
extortion. A forensic examination and autopsy of the rodent
revealed that it hadn’t been cooked, and no soup was found
in the mouse’s innards; the creature had, instead, died of a
skull fracture.

THE FINAL STRAW Anthony C. of Hillsborough, New Jersey, loved to write checks.
The problem: He didn’t have the money to cover them, so he bounced
nearly $50,000. During the trial, Anthony’s lawyer said his client
suffered from an obsessive-compulsive disorder that made him want to
please people and led him to purchase things he couldn’t afford. The
judge didn’t buy that argument and ordered him to jail.

Two days before beginning his sentence, he gave his girlfriend
nearly $8,000 in bad paper. But the final straw was a doctor’s note
Anthony gave authorities stating he was unable to serve time behind
bars because of his medical condition. The note was a forgery.

DEAD GIVEAWAY
An unidentified man from Johannesburg, South
Africa, told three friends he hadn’t been feeling well for
quite some time and believed he was eligible for a monthly
disability check. The man must have been worse off than he
thought—he died a short time later. But his friends didn’t
tell anyone. Instead, hoping to collect the monthly check for
themselves, the threesome dragged the man’s lifeless body to
the welfare office and propped him up for a required
fingerprinting, telling the clerk he had just passed out. But
the corpse’s cold, stiff hand was a dead giveaway. The clerk
called the cops.

LOONEY TUNES A New Orleans grocery store customer, Ashlie W., finished her
shopping and wrote a check to the store in the amount of $259.17. The
clerk, Gennifer Robinson, asked to see some identification. After
examining the ID, Robinson said, “I’ll need to get the manager’s
approval on this.” She left the customer standing in the checkout
line. Within minutes Ashlie was arrested for forgery.

It didn’t take Robinson a lot of detective work to figure out the
attempted fraud. The distinctive check had a Looney Tunes
background—the kind the clerk herself had. Then there was the name on
the check, “Gennifer Robinson”—the same as the clerk’s—whose purse,
containing her checkbook and driver’s license, had been stolen days
earlier. Yet, there was Ashlie, standing in front of Robinson, trying
to pass herself off as the clerk.

Though the stolen purse held four different picture IDs, Ashlie
apparently hadn’t looked too carefully. Robinson said, “I still don’t
know how she didn’t realize it was me.”

…AND THE LAW WON
Attempting to tug at the heartstrings of the
local citizenry, Norm M. of Sterling Heights, Michigan,
claimed his ex-wife had kidnapped their daughter. So he held
an event—complete with food and music—to collect money to get
her back. But cops knew the fund-raiser was a scam. About 50
people were in attendance when an undercover policeman took
the stage and sang a karaoke version of “I Fought the Law.”
When the song was over, the officer handcuffed Norm and hauled
him off to jail.

BRAGGING RIGHTS Humberto P. of San Antonio, Texas, was a big fan of a radio talk
show. So when the station invited listeners to call in and reveal the
biggest lie they’d ever told, he just couldn’t resist. Referring to
himself as John, he bragged about having a friend steal his truck so
he could file a false insurance claim and collect $7,000. The
fraudster even provided details on where and when the truck was
“stolen.”

Unfortunately for him, Steve McGraw of the FBI was listening to the
same radio program. McGraw said a quick check of stolen vehicle
reports led them to Humberto, who faces up to five years in prison for
fraud.

JOSEPH T. WELLS, CPA, CFE, founder and chairman of the Association
of Certified Fraud Examiners, is a contributing editor to the JofA
. He twice won the Lawler Award for the year’s top article in the
JofA , for which he has been named to the Journal of
Accountancy Hall of Fame. Mr. Wells also has been elected to
the AICPA Hall of Fame. His e-mail address is joe@cfenet.com .

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